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STDs

Squid have sex for three hours, STDs can cause a rise in foot fetishes, Domino’s Pizza wants you associate date rape with extra cheese, and Charlie Sheen likes to tweet during sex. Welcome to an edition of Naked News guaranteed to make you feel like your sex life is vanilla — and to make you feel OK with that.

Last week, GetSTDtested.com released their list of the Top 100 Sex&Love&Dating Blogs, and our little ol’ humble home site EMandLO.com not only made the top 10, we were ranked third! (Excuse us while we do The Running Man.) Only OkCupid’s OkTrends(#1) and EmpowHER.com (#2) beat us out. Now, we know this was just a clever…

We’ve been writing about sex and sexual health for more than a decade, and HPV still makes our heads swim. It’s such a complicated subject — complicated further by the emotional and political climate surrounding the vaccine — and guidelines on HPV seem to be constantly changing. It’s been in the news a lot lately, so we thought we’d review some of the latest headlines.If you want to brush up on the facts, check out the CDC’s HPV page here. And you can review everything we’ve published on HPV here.

“Getting to Zero” is the theme of the UNAIDS efforts (the joint United Nations program on AIDS/HIV).
Bono was on The Daily Show last night promoting his activist organization, One, and his fundraising one, Red.
Add a patch to the One and Red campaigns’ 2015 Quilt, pledging to buy at least one Red gift this holiday season, and you’ll get to choose one of The Killers six consecutive Christmas songs benefiting Red for free.

Its title may be tired, but the documentary LET’S TALK ABOUT SEX is as relevant and necessary as ever: LET’S TALK ABOUT SEX takes a revealing look at how American attitudes towards adolescent sexuality affect today’s teenagers. We live in a society that uses sex to sell everything from lipstick to laptops. Yet fear and silence…

Our friends, Em & Nora (who we like to call “Em & No”), recently launched a site for grown-ups about young adult literature called LoveYALit.com*, since (according to the New York Times) more and more people 18-and-over are enjoying books originally intended for the 18-and-under set. Of course, books about teens, the most hormonal among us, often deal with issues of first romantic relationships and sexual awakenings — and reading them as adults can emotionally transport us back to our own teenage years, when those things were really new and exciting, dramatic and traumatic. So we asked Em & Nora to give us a sampling of the good, the bad and the complicated of YA love and sex. We published the good first, here’s the bad, tune in next Thursday for the complicated:

THE BAD:

Sometimes in YA, the darker, more depressing and horrifying side of sex is explored – molestation, incest, rape, STDs…. You name it, and you’ll likely find it in the YA section. These books are often challenged by would-be book banners but, fortunately, the freedom to read usually reigns supreme. Please note: just because the sex in these books is bad doesn’t mean we think the books themselves are.

Identical by Ellen Hopkins (2008) — This novel in verse is told from the perspective of twin sisters, one who is sexually molested by their father and the other who deals with their father’s “favoritism” by seeking out sex with drug dealers and random, scummy guys. Sex scenes in YA are not frequently written with much detail, but the sexual assault by “Daddy” is some of the more graphic sex we’ve come across in YA. Disturbing with a capital D. Check out our full review of Identical on LoveYALit.
Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott (2008) — When “Alice” was 10, she was kidnapped by Ray, a nondescript middle-aged man, and forced to be his sex slave. Now that she is 15 and going through puberty, he’s starving Alice to slow down this process while forcing her to look for her “replacement.” This means trolling the playgrounds and choosing a suitable target. It’s a chilling yet fascinating look at the vulnerability of children to power, control and violence — and the subsequent dehumanizing effects of such abuse.

If using your mobile phone to simulate fart noises or fake an incoming call to escape a blind date are beneath you, try this one on for size: Researchers in the UK are working on a technology that would allow you to self-diagnose STDs on your phone. If you think you might have an STD, you’ll be able to pee on a computer chip about the size of a USB key (seriously, you pee on it… saliva will do in a pinch) and then plug that into your phone or computer for insta-diagnosis. The plan is to sell the chips in vending machines in night clubs, right next to the condoms, tampons, and mini sex toys (yep, those forward-thinking Brits already sell sex toys in night club vending machines, bless ‘em).

We’ve got our TiVo hooked up to get the latest Ted Talks on our TV, so we were delighted to find Mechai Viravaidya’s presentation “How Mr. Condom Made Thailand a Better Place” in our “Now Playing” list recently. Viravaidya is an eloquent and funny speaker, which alone makes it worth watching the 14-minute talk. But…

If you’re in New York City next Thursday night and want something fun and fabulous to do, go to the 4th annual Naughty Auction benefiting the National AIDS Fund (which leverages resources, develops leadership and advocacy, and fosters community innovation to prevent new HIV infections and care for people living with HIV/AIDS). The party, held…

This is just a friendly neighborhood reminder that April is National STD Awareness Month. Yes, if you’re having sex, you’ve still got to worry about those pesky little infections. As many as one in two sexually active young people will contract an STD by age 25. Young women, in particular, disproportionately bear the burden of…

A new study out from the CDC shows that herpes is twice as common in women than men, and three times as common in blacks than whites. A massive 48% of black women are infected. We called on Dr. Vanessa Cullins, an obstetrician/gynecologist and vice president for medical affairs at Planned Parenthood, to get the story behind these depressing statistics.

Em & Lo: Can you briefly explain the difference between HSV-1 and HSV-2, and how they are related to oral vs genital herpes?

Dr. Cullins: Herpes is a very common infection caused by two different but closely related viruses — herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) and herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2). Both are easy to catch. They remain in the body for life, and can produce symptoms that come and go. Both forms of herpes can infect the oral area, the genital area, or both. When the infection is on or near the mouth, it is called oral herpes. Oral herpes is caused most often by HSV-1. When herpes infection is on or near the sex organs, it is called genital herpes. Genital herpes is caused most often by HSV-2.

Australia kicked off its first ever Sexual Health Week yesterday (running through the 15th) to promote condoms, STI tests, birth control, etc. (To paraphrase Paul Hogan, now that’s a fight!) As part of the project, a survey was conducted showing that nearly all adult Australians taking part in the study have had unprotected sex, but only…

photo by zmxncbv.com When the relatively new HPV vaccine Gardasil came on the market for girls a few years ago, conservatives got their panties all in a bind over the possibility that it would give sweet, innocent P.Y.T.s permission to do it. Now that the vaccine is being considered for boys, no one seems too…